The Icon and the Axe

There was a hypnotic quality to the cadences of the church chant; and the hollow, vaselike indentations (golosniki) in the early Kievan churches produced a lingering resonance which obscured the meaning but deepened the impact of the sung liturgy. Pictorial beauty was present not only in mosaics, frescoes, and icons but in the*vestments worn in stately processions and in the ornate cursive writing (skoropis') with which sermons and chronicles later came to be written. The sanctuary in which the priests celebrated mass was the tabernacle of God among men; and the rich incense by the royal"door's, the cloudy pillar through which God came first to Moses,

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mid now to all men through the consecrated bread brought out by the priest at the climax of each liturgy.

The early Russians were drawn to Christianity by the aesthetic appeal of its liturgy, not the rational shape of its theology. Accepting unquestion-ingly the Orthodox definition of truth, they viewed all forms of expression as equally valid means of communicating and glorifying the faith. Words, , sounds, and pictures were all subordinate and interrelated parts of a common religious culture. In Russia-as distinct from the Mediterranean and Western worlds--"Church art was not added to religion from without, but was an emanation from within."19

The same desire to see spiritual truth in tangible form accounts for the extraordinary sense of history that is a second distinguishing feature of early Russian culture. As with many simple warrior people, religious truth tended to be verified by the concrete test of ability to inspire victory. The miraculous pretensions of Christianity were not unique among world religions; but Orthodox Christianity offered a particularly close identification of charismatic power with historical tradition: an unbroken succession of patriarchs, prophets, and apostles that stretched from creation to incarnation and on to final judgment. A sense of majesty and destiny was imparted by the Church, which had sprung up around the original sees of Christendom, and by the Empire, which centered on the city of Constantine the Great, the man who converted the Roman Empire to Christianity and took part in the first ecumenical council of the Church at Nicaea. Tales of the great empires of the East and of the holy lands were brought back to Kiev by merchants and pilgrims alike; and these were interwoven into the sacred chronicles with no sense of conflict or incongruity. Whereas Western and Northern Europe had inherited a still primitive and uncodified Christianity from the crumbling Roman Empire of the West, Russia took over a finished creed from the still-unvanquished Eastern Empire. All that remained for "a newcomer to accomplish was the last chapter in this pageant of sacred history: "the transformation of the earthly dominion into the ecclesiastical dominion":20 preparation for the final assembly (ekklesia) of saints before the throne of God.

"Because of the lack of rational orlogical elements, ancientRussian theology was entirely historical."21 The writing of sacred history in the form of chronicles was perhaps the most important and distinguished literary activity of the Kievan period. Chronicles were written in Church Slavonic in Kievan Russia I6ng before any were written in Italian or French, and are at least as artistic as the equally venerable chronicles composed in Latin and German. The vivid narrative of men and events in the original "Primary Chronicle" struck the first Western student of Russian chronicles, August

Schlozer, as far superior to any in the medieval West, and helped inspire him to become the first to introduce both universal history and Russian history into the curriculum of a modern university.

The final form of the Primary Chronicle, compiled early in the twelfth century, was probably based on the work of many hands during the preceding century; and it became, in turn, the starting point for innumerable subsequent chronicles of even greater length and detail. The reverence with which these sacred histories were regarded soon made slight changes in narration or genealogy an effective form of political and ideological warfare among fractious princes and monasteries. Variations in the phraseology of the chronicles remain one of the best guides to the internecine political straggles of medieval Russia for those able to master this esoteric form of communication.22